Typesafe, the company behind Reactive Platform, changed its name today to Lightbend and announced Lagom (Swedish for “just right”), an open source Microservices framework designed to simplify and accelerate application infrastructure modernization.

“Digital business has changed the playing field. It is disrupting traditional business models, and organizations that don’t invest in digital business will fall behind their competition,” said Gartner analyst Anne Thomas. “Software is the engine that runs digital business, so investing in it means investing in software. But traditional application architectures and platforms are obsolete.”

In response, enterprises like Walmart, Verizon, iHeartRadio, William Hill, and Samsung (see case studies) are investing in the Lightbend Reactive Platform to build low latency, fast data applications based on modern Microservice architectures. Gartner explores Microservices in its January 2016 report, Modernizing Application Architecture and Infrastructure Primer for 2016.

To reduce the risk and accelerate the transition to a Microservice architecture for traditional Java enterprises, Lightbend is launching a new open source framework, Lagom. Built using real-world experience and proven Reactive Platform technologies—Play web framework, Akka message-driven runtime, and ConductR deployment orchestrator—this opinionated solution abstracts away the complexities of decomposing legacy monolithic applications into distributed Microservice architectures.

What sets Lagom apart is the design emphasis on simplicity. Building and deploying several services or applications is common for Java enterprises, but the difficulty of these efforts increases by orders of magnitude when it comes to hundreds or thousands of individual, decoupled services. Lagom provides a guided, prescriptive approach to simplifying this process, allowing Java developers to leave behind brittle scripts and run a whole system of Microservices from a single command. Lagom’s ready-to-use connectors enable users to decompose their existing monolithic systems and revitalize their aging system architectures, resulting in distributed systems that are ready for production at high scale.

  • Simple start up from a familiar environment—In Lagom, a single command launches all Microservices. Developers remain productive with an iterative, hot-code update experience all from within their existing development environment, from IDEs to Continuous Integration servers.

  • Out-of-the-box legacy connectors—Lagom provides everything users need to breathe new life into legacy monolithic systems with ready-to-use connectors. Lagom supports distributed Microservice architectures by enabling data persistence via event-sourcing and CQRS–without the need to research new paradigms.

  • Ready to deploy into production—Unlike other frameworks, Lagom is fully asynchronous, non-blocking, and back-pressure enabled, requiring no additional infrastructure or technologies. This frees up teams from complicating their deployments by having to deal with additional technologies when it comes time to go into production.

“As we stated when we started the company, we set out to deliver a new platform for this modern era of multicore and cloud computing,” said Jonas Bonér, CTO and co-founder of Lightbend and creator of Akka. “We continue to deliver on that promise with Lagom. It does the heavy lifting for distributed systems, includes essential APIs, services and patterns based on a solid foundation of the Reactive principles. Now, every Java developer has the power to build distributed systems with confidence.”

Availability

  • The first MVP of Lagom for Java will be available through GitHub in early March, with Scala to follow.